The latest report on the NFL's contradictory stance on the football-concussion connection — the one unveiled Friday about how it awarded players disability based on their brain injuries while publicly denying that very connection?

It's old news.

And that's not a slap at ESPN and PBS, which jointly produced the report for, respectively, Outside the Lines and Frontline. Much to the contrary, it's a compliment. It's exactly that kind of "old news" that is digging the NFL into a deeper and deeper hole as the crisis over football and brain trauma grows worse.

The consequences for the league's decades of denial — as scores of former players are alleging in the mountain of class action suits against it — are devastating. That also is old news. But every scrap of evidence uncovered to show that the NFL talked out of both sides of its mouth, and did with the right hand without the left hand knowing, only weakens its own case and strengthens that of the players.

At first glance, this latest revelation is going to sting the NFL a little bit. A league spokesman distanced it from the news in an email, according to ESPN, laying responsibility for disability-claim decisions on its retirement board, chosen to operate independent from both the NFL and the players' union. Going unaddressed, though, was the notion that the NFL was aware that players — most prominently Mike Webster, the late Pittsburgh Steelers Hall of Fame center — were winning their claims based on rulings by that board that their brain-related disabilities were caused by football.

That merely goes straight to the heart of the issue at hand, in the current lawsuits and in the culture of the game today. The NFL went on the record over and over again throughout the 1990s and 2000s denying any correlation between football and brain injuries. It did it in front of Congress, in scientific reports from its medical experts, and to the NFLPA.

Throughout that time, the casualty count grew astronomical. "Not our fault,'' the NFL said, in essence.

Naturally, in recent years, as the NFL has done its 180-degree turn and put player safety and protection from head injuries at the top of its priority list, reminders of its past words and deeds have been brought up to them from all corners.

This is just the latest one.

And, again thanks to the two networks, they've found another way to keep Webster's tragic case in the spotlight. As reminders go, they don't get much uglier than Webster's. His lawyer in the disability case before the NFL retirement board, Bob Fitzsimmons, speaks up in the report. So does Webster's former wife, Pamela (they divorced shortly before his death). In archival footage, so does Webster, who died in 2002.

"Now they're doing a lot of re-decorating their stance,'' Pamela Webster said in the report. "They're making it look like, 'We care.' I think the NFL tried to keep this covered as long as they could.''

Testimony such as hers could be chalked up to emotion — as long as you overlook the facts that propel it (as well as her calm, clear enunciation of it). Not to mention the documented proof. The board approved Webster's claims in 1999. As the report showed, only three years ago — in 2009, a decade later — commissioner Roger Goodell tiptoed around the connection in an appearance before Congress.

It's an utterly damning contradiction.

It won't be the last one. The "re-decorating" will not stand as long as more dirt from the NFL's past on this issue is dug up. The stance is struggling to stand up even now. There's no reason to think the digging will stop.

Now we know a little more about what the NFL was trying to bury years ago. One of these days, all that "old news" is going to bury them.